Cathedral & Bazaar
In the Middle Ages Gothic Cathedrals were built by a small and secluded group of people. The so called Freemasons from Scotland set up a secret structure. They worked out a closed and hierarchically system, a franchising model so to speak, spreading all over Europe. Those builders called another brothers. They created wonderful works of art like the Cathedral of Chartres or the Notre Dame in Paris. The Freemasons were a secret group. If you spread the word of their existence to anyone, you ran the danger to have your tongue cut out. If you were a member of the club, you better kept your mouth shut and you would not give secrets away to anyone who did not belong to your group. As a result today we see Gothic cathedrals throughout Europe. Also we have conspiracy theories all over the internet, starting with the eye in the magic triangle of the dollar bill to a planned global take over of those hidden organizations.
The reality is much simpler. Whenever you have such structures in a society, there will be positive effects. If we look at today`s centralized IT structures, we see that some of the most remarkable soft- and hardware products on the market, were produced by hermetically and closed companies, such as Apple or Microsoft. These companies built propietary systems and structures that can be found all around the world. The same is true for companies like Cisco and HP. The world is a better place today for these companies.
When we look at typical European towns in the Middle Ages, we can see that Cathedrals were not the only types of building that were erected. There were many other buildings, only the cathedrals that were so scenic and such important landmarks caught the eye and stuck in any city. But all around them there was also a Bazaar. There were many buildings pertaining to it, grouped around the Cathedral. But there was no master plan. Bazaar buildings look different in each city. There were bridge- like structures such as Ponte Viecchio in Florence. There were large buildings or towers as in Krakow, the bazaar always came in a variety of forms. There was no closed group to organize bazaars. Still a Bazaar in Istanbul looks similar to a Bazaar in Tunis today, despite there surely being no Freemasons or secret Islamic sects around to erect them, but a standardized bazaar has functions that are similar and straight forward in all countries. In evolution, animals and plants will often develop similar features. This has nothing to with the fact that they were related, but only to the fact that the surrounding conditions were similar everywhere on the planet. Evolutionary forces are shaping fauna and flora in a similar way. Bazaar buildings came into being, because like minded people got together and contributed resources. They split revenues, they worked hard to make a success story come about.
The open organizations that build Bazaar structures operate on a grass- root level. These are organically growing structures, they need no centralized authority. Bazaar buildings help to bring cohersion to a community. They thrive because there is collaborative energy of citizens to defend their rights and independence. Cities become powerful and wealthy because of Bazaars and because of Cathedrals.
Today we have the Linux movement for software. And we have the Open Compute project for hardware. Both are a 100 % Bazaar. They have been tremendously succesfull. Thousands of free software programs participate under these licenses. System administrators all around the world heavily rely on them. And it all started with Linus Thorvalds, a young man from a Swedish minority in Finland who single handedly led this revolution. At the end it changed the way we compute and work today.
If we compare the two movements, we can say that in the Middle Ages, these movements developed separately from one another. And still they form a unity. The beauty of a Middle Age city stems from these two opposing forces. There is a Cathedral, controlled by the king and the clergy and there are citizens that create the fertile ground for the bazaar. It goes both ways. Unless you have a Cathedral to show the way, no bazaar will thrive. And vice versa. Bazaar spread in the mazes of side streets. Cathedrals dominate the main square. People that go to the Cathedral are the same that go to the Bazaar. They differ only in so far as in the Cathedral they are stiff and rigorous, whereas their true being starts to show in the Bazaar. In social media this would be the difference between Linkedin and Facebook.
The thesis is that a healthy nation needs two components, the Cathdral, the praying congregations, (and it does not matter if it is a Mosque or a Synagogue or some other place, where the values of a community manifest themselves). Secondly it is a free wheeling Bazaar.
In today`s IT world you have soft-and hardware developers that work for the Microsoft`s, Apples or Cisco`s of this world, before they decide to unite on the Internet and to give out their work for free to the community.
Our modern Europe has at its foundation free city states. Along the Baltic coast (the Hanse) or along the Fugger road connecting Milano with Rotterdam, we find this sort of backbone that makes up Europe. We see mighty rivers like the Rhine or the Danube, connecting people and goods. Our modern Europe is unthinkable without the piety and the values of those that helped the cathedrals to be build. Some cathedrals like the one in Cologne took centuries to be erected. They stand high and tall and dominate our cities. But our cities are unthinkable as well without the Bazaar, the guilds and trade associations that organize buildings, roads and businesses. What counts in both systems is a spirit of community and loyality. This sort of exchange has to go on for centuries, in order for science, education systems, political freedoms to result: only then wealth can develop in an ecosystem of a balance between cathedral & free trade.
In our modern times we have Linus Thorvalds the leader of the Linux kernel project and inventor of the collaborative process in software development; showing that Code developed over the Internet in view of the public can produce spectacular results. And we have hardware being developed with the Open Compute Project, which is represented in Europe by John Laban from London. This is a spectacular new approach to data center build up. As with software, you have passionate engineers who collaborate on specific projects and develop a proof of concept to be shared on the Internet. New hardware is developped without the unnecessary burden and cost of branding. The hardware that is developped is plug and play. There is no one Cathedral shop, running the show, there is an open Bazaar, where everyone has the chance to comment on the standards and develop what is best for the community. There are no patents, no hidden secrets. Everything is out to the open, the groups share the design, the blueprints, the schematics and the diagrams on the Internet and give advise where to purchase the commodities and freely exchange products. End-users, engineers in large data centers such as Facebook, pick up the configuration and later on, they purchase the various components directly from the supplier, sidestepping traditional way of buying things. The project is to kill the middlemen who is viewed as contributing little value. The quest is to make configurations easy and interchangeable, so everyone can participate in a modular fashion. Technicians that do the build up of data centers find suppliers via the Open Compute Project and get their fair share. No one ellbows the others to the side. As a result there are no more incompatibilities in CPU sockets or motherboards, this is more like a Lego approach and data centers that can be created at a fraction of the previous costs, practically without hard- or software fees.
If the Open Compute Project is as successful as the Linux movement, it will produce the next revolution in IT technology. It will have enormous repercussions on the way we build our data centers. Engineers will make reports for hardware releases and what is developed between those releases. They will not be restricted anymore by hardware vendors that push their propietary designs.
The way the hardware business is set up until now, it does not produce a free exchangability of parts and there is no leveraged playing field. There are profits for some, but there is no access to the vast majority of users. In contrast, if there well be an open group of developers, everything will be openly discussed on the internet and contributions will be more and better.
We have to do this because once 5G radio systems arrive, around the year 2020, the tactile internet will emerge. With a latency of 5 miliseconds the response time of our computer systems will reach the speed of our nervous systems. This will be a crucial moment for the development of our IT systems. It makes send to open world civilization to continued Cathedral & Bazaar patterns, both adding value & creativity to our communities.
Cathedrals have their meaning and Bazaar models counts. We needs to unite IT industrialization and IoT. If we want to produce the next evolutionary step in our industry, we have to allow for the bazaar model to evolve. Since the Middle Ages we have seen three critical moments when breakthroughs happened in technology and triggered far reaching social revolutions.
The first wave came around 1830, when new forms of energy utilization started to emerge. Coal was being burnt, the resulting steam engines triggered a revolution in factories and transportation. Railways were built on the basis of coal. Later the industrial revolution started in communications, when telegraph poles were built along these railroads.
The second wave came around 1910, when a new form of energy arrived. This time it was oil that was burnt in cars and later in airplanes. On the communication front, telephones and later the radio and TV appeared, with computers at the end.
The phase, in which we find ourselves today, started around 2010. Again, a new form of energy came in wide-spread use, the renewable energy of solar and wind. Parallel to that revolution, a revolution happened in the way we communicate, with the mobile Internet and IoT.
It is important to note that none of these periods starts or ends abruptly. Energy resources do not have to be replaced completely with new ones arriving. The transition happens smoothly and only when grid parity is reached, new energy phase in and become mainstream. There is always overlap. Rarely do new technologies replace old technologies immediately. Usually the process is an interplay between cathedral and bazaar. Both systems continue to be used in parallel. Only smoothly new ways of doing things move forward. It takes a while, until innovations become disruptive and prove their worth. If we look at the price of oil, we can see that in the last five years, it has gone down dramatically. A barrel of oil costed 150$ five years back. The price is at 50$ today. We use less oil today then in the past, despite the fact that the population of the world has grown dramatically. When we were young, we grew up with the belief that sooner or later coal and oil would be exhausted and the price of oil would go up. We expected serious shortages and catastrophic consequences. We lived in fear that soon the supply of energy would end and we would all be in trouble. Nowadays we recognize that all these dire predictions were wrong. It turns out, that there is plenty of fossil fuel around for many generations to come. Still we have learned how to use these valuable resources for a better purpose. We have learned how to create energy from the sun and from the wind directly. We have reduced the wasteful practice of burning oil for heating & transportation, we have discovered that it is smarter and more efficient to use solar & wind energy. The on-going energy from the sun is what counts! Why dig into the earth and mine coal? Why pump oil and waste this precious reserves that nature has created for us over millions of years when we can use solar? In a way our new approach towards energy is like the new approach towards food. We prefer a fresh apple from the one that fell from a tree. Once an apple has dropped and has laid around for a few weeks, it is not as good as a new apple picked from a tree fresh. The same is true for oil and solar.
Our present ?Zeitgeist“ reflects this new way of thinking. We think faster then our forefathers. We have to processed so much more information, and a lot of that information is contradictory and needs to be sorted out. We have to decide with greater speed what is good for us. We need ad-hoc processes of integrating new knowledge. We can not take anything for granted anymore. We need to be open & collaborative, we need to include all people from all over the world, no0 matter where. We have millions of newcomers to our global community every year, we see China, India, Africa and South America hook up with full speed to the Internet. We appreciate fresh and innovative thoughts arriving. Our most precious resource, our human inventiveness and scientific progress is being pushed forward. In many countries we see smart grid systems emerge. A revolution in transportation, public and private services is taking place. Solar cars are growing in numbers and all of these cars serve dual purposes. They are not only there to transport people, but they are also batteries for the benefit of all in times when the grid is off. Oil and coal will slowly disappear as energy sources. In our factories robotic manufacturing will become the norm. In our societies we will see new forms of collaborative networks appear. Millions of people will join Bazaar networks. And millions will join Cathedral networks. Both networks are needed. We have to have centralized and also decentralized networks. Only if we have both, we can create value. Open computing is in need today as it fills that missing link for our societies to really prosper.